Judah is not good at naming children. As described in Genesis 38, his three boys are עֵר (Er), אוֹנָן (Onan) and שֵׁלָה (Shelah).
עֵר means awake, and yet we read:
וַיְהִי עֵר בְּכוֹר יְהוּדָה רַע בְּעֵינֵי יְהֹוָה וַיְמִתֵהוּ יְהֹוָה
But Er, the bechor [first born] was displeasing to God, so God took his life
So much for being awake. And why was this? According to many teachers (pointedly, the Bresolvers) it was because he gave into his desire to masturbate. Rashi, interpreting the Talmud, says it was because he did not like the look of a pregnant woman and thus avoided conceiving with his wife. Several other sages opine along these lines.
Younger brother Onan, whose name means strong, does his ancient duty and takes on his brother’s widow after Er is smitten. In the end though, he’s not “strong” enough to avoid the family sin, for we read:
וַיֵּדַע אוֹנָן כִּי לֹּא לוֹ יִהְיֶה הַזָּרַע וְהָיָה אִם־בָּא אֶל־אֵשֶׁת אָחִיו וְשִׁחֵת אַרְצָה לְבִלְתִּי נְתׇן־זֶרַע לְאָחִיו׃
But Onan, knowing that the offspring would not count as his, let [the semen] go to waste whenever he joined with his brother’s wife, so as not to provide offspring for his brother.
And so he too is struck down — just like older brother Er. Thereafter, several things happen. The third boy Shelah (whose name means a thing wished for, or a wish) comes of age, Judah prevents him from filling in for his older brothers in the marriage bed, and Judah himself becomes a widower. At this point, father and remaining son set out for the “sheep shearing”, which sounds rather like a rodeo, or carnival.
The woman at the center of this mess of misfortune and misdeed is of course Tamar. We are told nothing of her origins, but her present condition is clear: she’s a widow twice over, and therefore among the lowest of the low. Bereft of support and defenseless, Judah sends her home in disgrace to her father’s house. It is clear that he has no intention of allowing her anywhere near Shelah-the-wished-for, or for that matter himself, ever again. To the fourth son of Israel, she has become a kind of un-person, an omen of doom, a living curse.
***
At this point in the story, Tamar transforms from object to subject. Her actions determine the story’s stormtrack from this point on — she becomes, as it were, its eye. She removes her widow’s clothes and dons those of a prostitute, concealing her face and positioning herself at the side of the road at a point past which Judah and his now-grown son Shelah must pass. The place is called עֵינַיִם (Einaim). The Talmud ( Sotah 10a:19) relates עֵינַיִם to the door of Abraham’s ancestral house, and also to the meaning of its root עין, meaning eye. Tamar sees. Judah does not — he falls for her disguise. This part of the story is full of the imagery of vision and illusion. Perception, veil, shroud — all suggest contrasts of concealment and sight. The root תמר (TMR, Tamar’s root) in Aramaic serves as the verb “to wink” or “to blink” … and so, in the blink of an eye, Tamar turns back the male gaze and the control it exerts onto those who have caused her distress. It is a reversal as complete as it is sudden.
The results — and there is really no more delicate way to put this — are a sexual transaction between Tamar and Judah, the negotiation of a price of one kid goat, and the provision of a pledge of Judah’s personal property pending its delivery. This property consists of three items: a signet ring, a “cord” (sometimes described as a cloak) and a staff. Having secured what is essentially her kompromat, Tamar (blink!) transforms back into a widow and departs, though she is now pregnant as a result of the encounter.
The story’s climax is a reckoning. Judah, having been unable to deliver the goat and reclaim his property, gives up any further attempts to recover his pledge for fear of repetitional ruin. A few months later, he is informed of Tamar’s evident pregnancy, and brings her out for judgement, declaring that “she should be burned.” It is at this moment that Tamar reveals that her pregnancy is due to the owner of Judah’s very own pledge, prompting this response from her (former?) father-in-law:
וַיֹּאמֶר צָדְקָה מִמֶּנִּי כִּי־עַל־כֵּן לֹא־נְתַתִּיהָ לְשֵׁלָה בְנִי
She is more in the right than I, inasmuch as I did not give her to my son Shelah.
This sentence encapsulates the internal morality of the story of Tamar. Judah’s sin is the failure to provide his third son, the one wished for, as a protector of his dead sons’ widow, according to the laws of levirate marriage. Apparently he did not er in raping her. Apparently he did not er in providing her with two completely defective sons. Apparently he did not er in sending her away in shame. Apparently he did not er in threatening to burn her. No — he simply did not provide a third son to redeem her, and thus failed.
***
Except that he did, of course, er in all of these ways.
Even the sages were uncomfortable with Judah’s conduct, as evidenced by their attempts to rehabilitate him. Certainly there are many Talmudic efforts to repair Tamar’s status as a reflection of Judah and his descendants. According to the magnificently-named sage “Efrayim the cucumber seller” a student of Rabbi Meir:
Tamar was the daughter of Shem
and thus, an Israelite, and the son of a priest (and hence not a Canaanite, and thus a suitable wife.) In Sotah 10b, we read that Judah continued his relationship with Tamar after this story’s conclusion. Thus even in our earliest tradition, Tamar is the object of a reclamation project. She is promoted from from un-person to the Jewish wife of a tribal head … which is to say she is allowed such status as the Rabbis feel willing to grant her.
As for Judah himself, excuses and elaborations of his actions abound, and I will not repeat them here. A good summary of the midrashic and aggahdic landscape around Genesis 38, compiled by the theologian Tamar Kadari, is accessible here and contains references to most of the relevant material.
Nor will I attempt to summarize (both because of my own lack of qualifications and the enormity of the subject) the landscape of feminist readings of the Tamar story which has manifested over the past half-century. Some of these critiques focus on Tamar’s victimhood and eventual resistance, while others see her as a liberationist figure who uses the womanist tools at her disposal in narrative-subverting ways. While this is a crude and probably unfair characterization of several decades of scholarship, my own emerging sense is that, quite contrary to the rabbinical efforts described above, these types of critiques are unified in their attempts to draw Tamar away from the toxic male environment/family/nation into which she has been thrust by the biblical narrative. Israel is no place for her. This is a perfectly logical and even praiseworthy effort given the horror of the narrative itself. But any project that defines Tamar’s personality and motivations in a way that segregates her from, rather than unites her with the story of Israel has one obvious pitfall: it will fail to account for what else we know about Tamar: that she is the mother, via Perez, of David. And thus according to tradition, the foremother of Mashiach, redeemer of the universe and bringer of the age of peace.
***
In Tamar, Helen, and Love’s Ambition , his imaginative article published recently in Jewish Review of Books, filmmaker and critic Noah Millman provides a refreshing perspective on Tamar’s character and significance through the twin lenses of Thomas Mann’s novel Joseph and His Brothers and Helen, one of Shakespeare’s lesser known Heroines from All’s Well that Ends Well. In the world of this essay, a Tamar emerges who not only transcends the moral limits of the Biblical narrative, but also positions herself, through her own agency, at the center of the Israelite story.
Millman provides this summary of the Tamar of Joseph and His Brothers:
The audacity of Mann’s Tamar … is astounding. First, she imagines wedding herself to Judah, but to triumph this way would require the deaths of his Canaanite wife and his three sons, a prospect from which she recoils. So she determines to marry his eldest, Er, despite his questionable and sickly nature, and prevails upon Jacob, her teacher, to win him for her. He does, yet that marriage ends bloodily almost immediately, her husband dying of a hemorrhage on his wedding night. In need of a justification to be wed to Onan, it is Tamar herself, in Mann’s telling, who comes up with the law of levirate marriage, a law that Jacob accepts to be just and therefore promulgates. If midrash is anxious to veil Tamar behind the curtain of divine providence, Mann magnifies her into a questing figure who not only determines her own fate but establishes the law to do so.
Mann’s Tamar is a Canaanite, not an Israelite. He describes her as “a woman . . . seated at the feet of Jacob, the man rich in stories.” Though an outsider, she learns not from Shem, but from Jacob, Shem’s student (see Bereshit Rabbah 63:10), and thereby becomes captivated by Torah. As Mellman explains, Mann’s Tamar is “motivated ultimately by the desire to be a part of a story that is already written and is bigger than her.” If we choose to see her as a convert, she is one that is distinguished by both her audacity and her otherness. Enthralled by his spells, but finding no place for herself in Jacob’s world, Mann’s Tamar invents levirate marriage. In other words, she begins her life as a Jew by building such halakha as will be necessary for her sustenance in the community. Her response to structural un-welcome is not victimhood, nor is it trickery and rage. It is to change the legal structure itself.
This halakhic innovation alone, however, would seem insufficient to merit her status as the mother of the line of David and the world’s transformation. What additional credentials entitle her to this honor, particularly given her status in the first part of the story?
If Mann’s Tamar is enthralled and captivated by Jacob’s Torah and turns to her wits to ensure her place in the community, we can look to the Breslover tradition for a Tamar who is just as active in the mystical sphere. This is a Tamar who is not only bewitched by Jacob’s Torah so that she acts, but transform’s Jacob’s magic into a species of numinous power entirely her own. The first portion of Sefer Yetzirah contemplates the creation of the world from a number of mystical angles, including the idea that that world was created by:
בשלשה ספרים בספר וספר וספור
which is to say, by a scroll, by a scribe and by a story. In the mystical tradition as expressed by the Breslover, these correspond to:
The parchment upon which the book is written, the ink that is inscribed in the book, and the quill that writes the book.
Furthermore:
These three things correspond to the three items that Judah gave Tamar as collateral. The cloak corresponds to the sefer ie: the skins upon which a book is written. The seal or ring represents the sofer, the medium of the ink. The staff is the sippur, the quill that writes the book.
(See Likutey Halakhot VII)
If these sound like the very ingredients required to create a Torah scroll, that is because they are. The implication, according to Breslov tradition, is that Tamar merited her status as the eye of the mystical story, and the mother of Israel’s eventual mystical destiny, because she is the direct and active inheritor — from Jacob himself — of the Torah of creation.
Mashiach himself is the guarantor for the entire world … therefore Tamar insisted on collateral for their union, in order to invoke the collateral that Mashiach would represent.
(ibid.)
This collateral is the Torah itself.
Seen from this yod perspective, Tamar is no vessel, nor is she an agitating outsider. She is nothing less than conduit for the reign of justice and peace over all the earth, and the mystical trustee of the cosmic Truth. A foreigner, despised and mistreated, she nevertheless refuses to release the dream of human justice, creating for herself the legal structures that permit her own inclusion and survival in her destined community and family, no matter how the individuals of this family might reject her in their ignorance. And ultimately she demands and achieves her own full and unique place at the center of Israel’s story — she becomes its eye, for she alone, aside from Jacob, can see what is to come.
***
Reading Tamar’s story from this angle, I dream two dreams for every Jew who has ever felt themselves to be excluded, beyond the margins, unfit, misfit, or undeserving in any way.
I dream first that like Mann’s Tamar, we allow ourselves to be bewitched by the words of Jacob. I dream that we stop pretending that we do not wish to mean something in and to our tradition. I dream that we dare, like Tamar, to want to belong. For those of us born as Jews, I dream that we no longer take our inheritance for granted. I dream that we fall in love again (or, as is mostly the case, for the first time) with Judaism itself. And for those who are Jews by choice, I dream that we acquire the courage to believe that we especially must stand in the very center of things, for it is through us that Israel will be renewed.
And then I dream a second dream. Especially for the most despised, the lonely, the un-parented, the queer, the broken, the abused, the ignored and the rejected of the Jewish world — and these are many. That we demand, that we lead. That we renew existing law and build new law, that we define the Jewish future, and that we claim without apology and by any means necessary our own places at the mystical center of the great dream of Jacob. In the words of the Psalmist, by tradition the descendant of Tamar herself:
מקימי מעפר דל מאשפת ירים אביון
להושיבי עם־נדיבים עם נדיבי עמו
G-d raises the poor from the dust,
lifts up the needy from the refuse heap
to set them with the great,
with the great ones of the people.